The Killer Inside Her

Don't let the innocent look fool you. Shalane Flanagan is an assassin in compression socks with an Olympic Marathon in her sights.

In her first-ever 10-K, Flanagan put the world on notice by smashing the U.S. record by 17 seconds.

To do that, though, she first had to cut a bone out of her foot.

Talk about a medical anomaly: For the first 24 years of her life, one of America's most gifted runners ran with an extra bone in her left foot. The size of a fingernail, it was embedded in her posterior tibial tendon. "I'd get a sharp jabbing pain every time I toed off," she says. She and her husband, Steve Edwards, a former UNC runner who's now her manager, shopped the injury all over the country. "We saw close to 10 doctors, homeopaths, physical therapists—nobody could figure it out," Edwards says. Finally an orthopedic surgeon spotted the extra bone in an x-ray. One surgery and a year of rehab later, she finally ran pain-free.

With one eye on the 2008 Olympics, Flanagan paired up with former George Mason University coach John Cook, who was also working with rising middle-distance stars Shannon Rowbury and Erin Donohue. Flanagan thrived under Cook. She broke the U.S. 5000-meter record and lowered the indoor American 3000-meter standard by six seconds. In the spring of 2008, she put the world on notice by smashing the American record in the 10,000 meters by 17 seconds—in her first-ever 10-K.

Four years after Athens, Flanagan arrived in China primed to podium. After spending a few days getting acclimated at USA Track & Field's training camp in Dalian, China, Flanagan came down with food poisoning the night before she was scheduled to fly to Beijing. "Initially, I freaked out," Flanagan says. "All your dreams are riding on this one moment, and disaster strikes."

As it happened, that all-night puke session turned out to be a catharsis. "The next day, I thought: This is out of my control. I felt the weight of expectations lifted off my shoulders. By the time I made it to the starting line, I felt great to just be there. I was open to any possibility—from medaling to not even finishing."

She toed the line with Ethiopians Elvan Abeylegesse (running for Turkey) and Tirunesh Dibaba, who had broken the 5000-meter world record two months earlier. Dutch half-marathon world record holder Lornah Kiplagat (no relation to Edna Kiplagat) was there, as were fellow Americans Kara Goucher and Amy Yoder Begley. On race day a rumor circulated that Kiplagat planned to go out fast. Flanagan was familiar with the strategy.

She says she chose New York "to face the best right off the bat. I had to know, Do I have what it takes?"

"When Lornah went out at the gun, I thought, This isn't a fake move; this is for real," Flanagan says. "So I latched on and hung on for dear life." In a race described by the BBC as "brutally quick," Flanagan stayed with the leaders and concentrated on picking off competitors one by one. "It was like a NASCAR race. There were so many women on the track, and toward the end we were lapping people. I was so focused on eating up people I couldn't tell who was ahead of me and who was being lapped."